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Plain and Chocolate Dipped Parisian Sweets
1/2 a cup of Sultana raisins, 5 figs, 1 cup of dates, 2 ounces of citron, 2/3 a cup of nut meats, (almonds, filberts, pecans or walnuts, one variety or a mixture), 1 1/2 ounces of Baker's Premium No. 1 Chocolate, 1/3 a cup of confectioner's sugar, 1/4 a teaspoonful salt, Chocolate Fondant or Baker's "Dot" Chocolate.
Pour boiling water over the figs and dates, let boil up once, then drain as dry as possible; remove stones from the dates, the stem ends from the figs; chop the fruit and nut meats (almonds should be blanched) in a food chopper; add the salt; and the sugar and work the whole to a smooth paste; add the chocolate, melted, and work it evenly through the mass. Add more sugar if it is needed and roll the mixture into a sheet one-fourth an inch thick. Cut into strips an inch wide. Cut the strips into diamond-shaped pieces (or squares); roll these in confectioner's sugar or dip them in chocolate fondant or in Baker's "Dot" Chocolate, and sprinkle a little fine-chopped pistachio nut meats on the top of the dipped pieces. When rolling the mixture use confectioner's sugar on board and rolling pin.
A no-cook confection: dried fruit and nuts ground to a paste, bound with melted unsweetened chocolate and sugar. The only real difficulty is moisture control.
- Drain the fruit hardThe scald is only to soften and clean the figs and dates. If any water stays behind the paste will never firm up enough to roll and cut, and no amount of extra sugar will fix it without turning the sweets cloying. Press the fruit between towels.
- Baker's Premium No. 1This was the company's unsweetened baking chocolate. Use 1 1/2 oz unsweetened chocolate, melted; the recipe's sugar is calculated against a chocolate with none of its own.
- Baker's "Dot" ChocolateA discontinued sweetened coating chocolate sold for dipping. Substitute tempered dark chocolate or a commercial confectionery coating; untempered plain chocolate will set soft and bloom grey within days.
- Sultanas and citronSultanas are a pale seedless raisin, usually sold in the US as golden raisins. Citron here is candied citron peel, still sold at holiday baking counters; candied orange peel is a possible stand-in and gives a brighter result.
- Food chopperA hand-cranked meat grinder. A food processor does the job, but pulse rather than run it — the nuts turn to butter quickly and the mass goes greasy. Grinding the fruit first, then adding nuts for a few short pulses, keeps the texture.
- AlmondsBlanching means slipping the skins off after a minute in boiling water. Skip it and the paste is flecked brown and slightly bitter, which matters more here than in a baked good.
- RollingWork on a sugared board with a sugared pin, as directed, and chill the sheet for 20 minutes before cutting. Cold paste cuts to clean diamonds; room-temperature paste drags.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe gives no count; the number of pieces depends entirely on how large the diamonds are cut. Sugar-rolled pieces keep some time in a tin between waxed paper; dipped ones are best eaten sooner, stored cool but not refrigerated.
Walter Baker & Co. of Dorchester, Massachusetts issued Choice Recipes and its successors as advertising cookbooks, and the presence of two named house products in one ingredient list — Premium No. 1 and "Dot" — is the whole point of the page. The sweet itself belongs to a family of uncooked fruit-and-nut pastes that American confectionery books of the period liked to call Parisian or French, a label that generally signalled refinement rather than any documented Paris origin. The pistachio garnish and diamond cut are conventional confectioner's finishing of the era, meant to make a homemade sweet look like something bought from a shop window.